For the love of Ayn Rand

Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal in The Fountainhead or young Lance Mannion and a girl worth reading Ayn Rand for?

One happy fall, when I was nineteen and a sophomore in college, a girl I was madly in lust with let it be known that her favorite book in the world was The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. So I read it.

All in one sitting.

I stayed up all night and in the morning I went over to her place to ask her out to breakfast so we could discuss it.

I was rewarded with a very pleasant couple of weeks followed by a long weekend during which we didn’t see each other and realized that neither of us minded not seeing the other all that much. It was one of the easiest and gentlest breakups imaginable, although, since she was an actress, she had to add an element of drama. She arranged that we play out our goodbye scene late at night with me standing at the foot of the stairs to her apartment and her hiding behind the half-open door, sobbing loudly. I agreed not to hate her forever, she assured me it was her not me, and after five minutes of this the curtain came down. She went inside to read her reviews, and I went to buy donuts which I ate sitting by the river while I thought things over.

I came to no conclusions.

The funny thing was we never really discussed The Fountainhead. To this day I wonder what she liked so much about the book and why she thought it was important that I read it in order to “understand” her. Something to do with the integrity of an artist, I supposed at the time. But although I sympathized with Howard Roark in his struggle against the “mediocrities,” I didn’t think his genius gave him the right to blow up buildings or rape the boss’s daughter.

Maybe, I thought, she just loved the book for the same reason I loved David Copperfield . I didn’t know much about Rand including the fact she was supposed to be some sort of philosopher. I just thought she was a famous writer and, not knowing any better, I supposed that meant she was a good writer.

I decided I might understand things better---Rand, The Fountainhead, the girl I’d read the book for, myself---if I read one of Rand’s other books. I went to the library and checked out a copy of Atlas Shrugged.

It’s one thing to plow your way through a novel in the course of one night in the expectation that when you are done a beautiful girl will let you undress her.

Literary judgments tend to get put on hold.

With no hope of reward in the form of winning the affections of a lovely and obliging fellow pseudo-intellectual, your average nineteen year old is going to crack open even a novel by Tolstoy with an extremely critical eye.

Two chapters in and I was ready to throw the book out the window, and I would have, except that it was a very fat book and I was afraid it might kill someone in the quad below and back then I believed that if you started a book you were under an obligation to finish it.

Atlas Shrugged cured me of that belief by Chapter 10.

Nobody, I decided, could be obligated to read a book this goddamn awful.

But I pressed on. I read the whole thing. I wanted bragging rights. I wanted to be able to impress my friends and professors with the boast that I had read all 1200 pages of the worst written book in the English language.

No one was ever impressed.

One thing to note. Even after I’d finished Atlas Shrugged I still had no idea Ayn Rand was a philosopher. All I knew was that she had written a very long and very dull book. Reading Atlas Shrugged taught me something about The Fountainhead though.

It was a bad book too.

And from this I concluded that Ayn Rand was a bad writer.

I can’t remember when I learned that a lot of people overlooked her bad writing on the grounds that she was a philosopher and what her philosophy was. Before I got to grad school, I think. I immediately spotted two things wrong here.

Nobody had to excuse Camus’ writing.

And there was an obvious flaw in her thinking. Rand assumed it would be self-evident to everyone just who was a Howard Roark or a John Galt and who was not. It didn’t occur to her, or didn’t matter to her, that her philosophy of selfishness and self-indulgent narcissism would appeal to every self-infatuated little prick looking for an excuse to be as selfish and contemptuous of social norms as he liked. For every true Galt and Roark there would be dozens of “parasites” and “mediocrities” who believed Rand had given them permission to be sociopaths and treat other people as “mediocrities” and “parasites” without regard for their rights, needs, or feelings.

What kind of world would we be living in if every selfish, self-infatuated little prick decided he was a Howard Roark or a John Galt?

Seemed to me Dostoevsky had already asked and answered that one.

A world in which selfish, self-infatuated little pricks take axes to the heads of little old ladies.

So that was it. Bad writer. Lunatic thinker. Nothing else to see here. Move along.

For a long while afterwards the only time I thought about Ayn Rand was when I thought about that girl back in college.

I knew her books were still widely read, that they even turned up on high school and college reading lists. But I figured it was for the same reason that students and scholars still read Mein Kampf and The Prince, for the historical interest.

It wasn’t until I started spending time reading blogs that I found out that there were people reading Rand’s work and taking it seriously.

Who knew the world contained so many selfish, self-infatuated little pricks looking for permission to take axes to the heads of little old ladies?

This realization was sobering and depressing but not surprising. After all, what does Raskolnikov learn? That instead of being a superman, he’s just a selfish, self-infatuated little prick of an all too common sort. Types like him are a kopek a dozen.

So I was wrong about no one taking Rand seriously as a thinker.

But I remained convinced that no one could take her seriously as a writer.

No one could possibly read her books for the fun of reading them.

Well, I’ll tell you something else I’ve learned since I was a sophomore in college.

My own tastes in literature are just that. My own.

I’ve mentioned it in passing before, but I’ll go a little more in detail about it now. I enjoy Atlas Shrugged quite a bit, and will re-read it every couple of years when I feel in the mood. It has a propulsively potboilery pace so long as Ayn Rand’s not having one of her characters gout forth screeds in a sock-puppety fashion. Even when she does, after the first reading of the book, you can go, “oh, yeah, screed,” and then just sort of skim forward and get to the parts with the train rides and motor boats and the rough sex and the collapse of civilization as Ayn Rand imagines it, which is all good clean fun. Her characters are cardboard but they’re consistent — the good guys are really good in the way Rand defines “good,” and everyone else save Eddie Willers and the picturesquely doomed Cherryl Brooks are obnoxious shitheels, so you don’t really have to worry about ambiguity getting in the way of your zooming through the pages.

Rand is an efficient storyteller that way: You know early on what the rules of her world are, she sticks with those rules, and you as the reader are on a rail all the way through the story. It’s not storytelling that works for everyone, and it doesn’t work for me with every book I read. But if you’re in the mood not to work too much, it’s fine to have an author who points dramatically at the things she wants you to look at, and keeps the lights off the things she doesn’t. Basically, I find her storytelling restful, which I suppose isn’t a word used much to describe her technique, but which fits for how it works for me.

John isn’t making the case that Rand was a good writer in the way Dickens and Dostoevsky were. He’s only saying that as the teller of a ripping good yarn she knew what she was up to.

John’s post includes a nice anecdote about how Atlas Shrugged helped him survive a hellacious cross-country bus trip with his sanity intact and a just appreciation of Rand’s philosophy as laid out in the novel, to wit:

All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick. Indeed, if John Galt were portrayed as an intelligent cup of yogurt rather than poured into human form, this would be obvious. Oh my god, that cup of yogurt wants to kill most of humanity to make a philosophical point! Somebody eat him quick! And that would be that.

At any rate, and obviously, it was John’s posts that got me thinking about that girl back in college and wondering once again what she saw in The Fountainhead that made her take it to heart.

As I said, she was an actress, which made her an artist like Howard Roark, but she wasn’t very good and, it turned out, she wasn’t committed to a life on the stage. She dropped out of school to marry a potter and follow him to his kiln back in Ohio.

Maybe he was her Howard Roark and to this day he’s smashing pots he’s sold to people who’ve had the nerve to put ugly flowers in them.

But maybe she just loved The Fountainhead because it was a ripping good yarn.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

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I had a wonderful high school English teacher without whom my success in college would have been unthinkable. She often talked about the books she most enjoyed. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were on the list. As were the works of James Michener. So I read The Source, in which I learned what "B.C.E." meant; contrary to the yahoos of today the abbreviation is old and is not part of a conspiracy. Next came The Drifters, Kent State (moving, but Neil Young was more memorable), and Centennial, and that was enough of that. I did get through The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as a college freshman. And then some of Ms. Rand's "philosophy." None of this hurt, but it is disconcerting that people ever took Ayn Rand seriously past the mental age of 19. Maybe that is the problem? Mrs. Parker from the 11th grade? I take her seriously to this day.

I think people *should* read Atlas Shrugged when they are young. It can have the desirable effect of jolting something awake. The age of nineteen is just about perfect. The title is one of the most brilliant, pithy images in the history of book titles (is it her invention?). But I am flabbergasted when people of intelligence and character and experience fail to figure out--quickly and easily--its logical fallacies, or decide that it expresses a philosophy to live by. At that point, it morphs into a force for evil.

I've been thinking of re-reading A Tale of Two Cities. Your post has made me certain that I will, as an antidote to all the people reading Ayn Rand.

In the meantime, here is a passage I shared with a friend yesterday. This is from the first five or so pages of fiction George Eliot wrote. She was nearly forty when she picked up a pen and tried her hand at fiction, and here's what came out:

Reader! Did you ever taste such a cup of tea as Miss Gibbs is this moment handing to Mr. Pilgrim? Do you know the dulcet strength, the animating blandness of tea sufficiently blended with real farmhouse cream? No – most likely you are a miserable town-bred reader, who thinks of cream as a thinnish white fluid, delivered in infinitesimal pennyworths down area steps; or perhaps, from a presentiment of calves’ brains, you refrain from any lacteal addition, and rasp your tongue with unmitigated bohea. You have a vague idea of a milch cow as probably a white-plaster animal standing in a butterman’s window, and you know nothing of the sweet history of genuine cream, such as Miss Gibbs’s: how it was this morning in the udders of the large sleek beasts, as they stood lowing a patient entreaty under the milking-shed; how it fell with a pleasant rhythm into Betty’s pail, sending a delicious incense into the cool air; how it was carried into that temple of moist cleanliness, the dairy, where it quietly separated itself from the meaner elements of milk, and lay in mellowed whiteness, ready for the skimming-dish which transferred it to Miss Gibbs’s glass cream-jug. If I am right in my conjecture, you are unacquainted with the highest possibilities of tea; and Mr. Pilgrim, who is holding that cup in his hand, has an idea beyond you.

I agree that Atlas Shrugged is both evil and badly written, but I have a little more fondness in my heart for The Fountainhead as a specimen of 20th-century pulp fiction on a par with Lydia Bailey by Kenneth Roberts, which I'm in the middle of now. The Fountainhead has an actual character in it, Howard Roark -- IIRC Rand said at one point that she wrote the novel to present Roark "as an end in himself" -- and he is located within something like the real world. (The characters and situations of Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand, live nowhere outside of Rand's own brain.)

My favorite novels, like Middlemarch or Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, do two jobs at once -- they tell me a story I care about, about characters I care about, and present a holistic view of either my real world, some historical real world, or some imagined world that (unlike Rand's bizarre "future USA") is worth presenting as an end in itself.

Perhaps what inoculated me against Rand was having read Crime and Punishment first. I've never understood how anyone could still believe it was important or good once they had realized that even if they thought they were smarter and more competent than everybody else, that didn't mean they got to do whatever they wanted.

I would add to Sherri's comment: even if they thought they were smarter and more competent than everybody else, there remains the possibility that they are wrong about that. I've never thought utter confidence was a virtue.

PROGRESSIVE 2:"That's okay, I'll just grab a few more from the-- What? When? Where'd they go?"

You guys are funny. You're like atheists who are so sure of your intellectual superiority, but when cornered by a Dinesh D'Souza (or Ayn Rand) all you can do is roll your eyes Nancy Derringer-style and cluck your tongue.

1. You're doing a variation on the "You commies should move to Russia if you don't like it here" routine, which marks you as old, which is ok, I'm old too. But just saying.

2. I didn't say Rand is wrong because she doesn't agree with Dostoevsky. I said there's a big flaw in her thinking because she failed to imagine how appealing her philosophy would be to little pricks like Raskolnikov who imagine themselves to be John Galts and Howard Roarks.

3. There's a reason I included both the extended quotes from John Scalzi's post and the links.

4. Do you ever really read any of my posts or do you just drop by because it's a convenient forum for you to draw your liberals as commies cartoons?

Keep the product of your work efforts and stop hobbling the real producers and contributors to our society?

Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.

There's an interview I read where someone listed Rand and Dostoevsky as two of his favorite authors. He liked Rand for the individualism theme, and rejected or glossed over almost everything else. I know Rand fans who like her for the same reason. The thing is, so many other (and I'd say better) works have individualistic, be-true-to-yourself themes as well, and most high schools will cover a few of them. Still, if someone gets such and such value from this or that work, that's fine. Both you and Scalzi capture that spirit.

The kicker is with all these glibertarian wankers who take Rand seriously as a brilliant philosopher, and never recognize or admit that her ideology doesn't work outside of her rigged-demo novels. They never note that "obvious flaw."

The Dostoevsky comparison is apt, because Rand trashed him, probably because Crime and Punishment rebutted her entire ideology before she even wrote it. And Dostoevsky remains a far better writer, in terms of prose, of plot, and certainly when it come to psychological depth. Rand's style is reminiscent of bad Soviet agitprop, just with the ideology flipped, more ponderous prose and less choral singing.

I haven't read Crime and Punishment in several years, but it's one of my favorite novels. Raskolnikov is obviously self-absorbed, callous and rationalizing at the start, but he does have a conscience, and he does change significantly. Without Porfiry and more importantly, Sonya, he might not have done so.

A Shakespeare prof of mine observed that the Bard's tragedies are typically centered on individuals, whereas the comedies are more about communities and relationships. (Slightly OT – Check out the excellent Macbeth with Patrick Stewart that PBS aired this week. If you missed it, it'll be online later on.) Rand rejected such human connections in her writings and interviews, and really any notion of generalized reciprocity or human kindness or whatever you want to call it. She's like the propagandist press secretary for the pre-conversion Scrooge. And the personal life depicted in The Passion of Ayn Rand is pretty twisted. Raskolnikov tried to reject those ties as well, but found he couldn't – in part because he's shown a grace and forgiveness he might not really deserve. As is Valjean. As is the Count in The Marriage of Figaro.

That's one path. There are others. Kent's description of Oswald in King Lear sorta applies:

Such smiling rogues as these
Like rats oft bite the holy cords atwain
Which are too intrinse t’unloose; smooth every passion
That in the natures of their lords rebel,
Being oil to fire, snow to the colder moods;
Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks
With every gale and vary of their masters,
Knowing naught, like dogs, but following.

I said there's a big flaw in her thinking because she failed to imagine how appealing her philosophy would be to little pricks like Raskolnikov who imagine themselves to be John Galts and Howard Roarks.

It is astounding how many people dream of living in Galt's Gulch when they really belong on the B Ark.